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Several Deer

Adam Crothers

Several Deer
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Categories: 21st Century, British, First Collections, Humour, Irish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2016)
9781784102449
£9.99 £8.99
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2016)
9781784102456
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017
    Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017

    Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock ’n’ roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic’s ironizing compulsion. ‘Now send in the clowns’, ends the collection’s opening poem – and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn’t take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.
    Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and lives in Cambridge. His Carcanet collections are Several Deer (2016), which in 2017 won both the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, and The Culture of My Stuff (2020). ... read more
    Awards won by Adam Crothers Winner, 2017  The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize (Several Deer) Winner, 2017  The Shine/Strong Award
    (Several Deer)
    'Adam Crothers's Several Deer is a pun-tastic prick-tease for any reader who likes their poems with a slice of straightforward emotional narrative...It's equal parts delightful and infuriating: a highly charged word-drunk ride across time, art and idiomatic expression.'
    Chrissy Williams, Poetry London
    'Scarily beautiful'
    Luke Kennard
    'Wild and weird'
    John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
    'The poems are ingenious and sonorous and will spin your mind like a record, baby.'
    Rob A. Mackenzie, Magma Poetry
    'This is poetry at its most playful, sonorous and broad but also technical and intricately textured. It is poetry that compels itself forward with a terrific energy born out of appearing as though it might at any moment fall flat on its face.'
    Nathan Ellis, The London Magazine
    'Never was so much meaning packed into small verses; pour the oils of reading on almost anything in this collection and whole worlds mushroom. It is annoyingly impressive and, I must say, I hate this young fellow whatever club he's playing at tonight...Several Deer is such a mixture of irony and malaprop, of MacNeice splendour and Audenesque knowingness, that it will annoy as many readers as it thrills. But I'm in Crothers' fan club, I have to say, and I would never want to refute a poet like this, a poet of the new post-Troubles era, who, unmistakably assembled on Ulster soil, has been given a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens.'
    Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet
    'Adam Crothers' Several Deer is that rare thing, a genuinely enjoyable poetry collection. It is also, in places, very funny. His register is that of the misheard or misremembered, of "pussy rot" or "the unquiet gravy". Sources as disparate as The Sensations and Robert Herrick get mashed together into goofball sonnets and villanelles. And yet for all its wit and brio, there is great seriousness to his work. Crothers is a worthy addition to yet another nouvelle vague of brilliant young poets from Northern Ireland.'
    Conor O'Callaghan
    'This is a collection that shows intellectual force and ambition, its language always taut and lively and fun for the reader. Nightmare whispers, musical echoes, emotional truths, collide; the poems have each their own stance, and the book opens on an ocean of voices.'
    Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin
    Praise for Adam Crothers 'Crothers' lyrical wordplay is a joy to read... subjects are too multifarious to be constrained by definition. All is driven onwards by an impeccable sense of rhythm'
    Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2020
    A poet of the new post-Troubles era, who, unmistakably assembled on Ulster soil, has been given a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens.
    Thomas McCarthy
    Linguistic pirouetting, few-pints-deep wordplay and joyful disruptions of phonetics and etymology and aphorism. A poet who wields line breaks like a matador’s cape.
    Susannah Dickey
    A joybomb of wit, play, sass and Heideggerian thinginess. This book is what might happen if Paul Muldoon and Alan Gillis wrote a rap album. Buy it, bitches.
    Caoilinn Hughes
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